Blueprint to SEO Success: Q&A From Our Webinar | iContact

Clearly, SEO ranks high on the list of concerns for many marketers. We had over 1100 registrants for our recent webinar, Blueprint to Search Engine Success, and many attendees posed a lot of interesting questions afterward. Since we ran out of time to answer all of the questions, we asked our presenters, Simone Watson, Digital Marketing Manager at iContact, and Loren Baker, Founder of Search Engine Journal to answer some of them here in the blog.

Which website building platform is best for easily setting up and managing SEO?

Simone Watson, Digital Account Manager, iContact

Simone: Hands down, Wordpress is the easiest platform to manage SEO. Wordpress has hundreds of plugins available to help with SEO, with the most popular being the Yoast SEO plugin. Drupal has also made advancements. Unfortunately, some of the popular e-commerce platforms (i.e. Shopify, Volusion, Magento) don’t make SEO easy. However, if you reach out to their support team, you can probably find solutions to common SEO errors such as, missing meta titles or meta descriptions.

Loren: Agreed on WordPress. It has gotten much better over the years and while it is not 100% SEO compliant right out of the box, it is pretty close. There are also CMS solutions based on WordPress, like StudioPress, which is a hosted WP platform that offers many additional tools and reporting.

How frequently can you submit your site for a crawl request on Google Search Console?

Simone: In Google Search Console, you can submit a crawl request for only one URL up to 500 times a month. However, if you want Google to crawl a URL and its direct links, that request can only be done 10 times a month.

Loren: I think the main thing to remember here is that it is a request to index and not a “submit to index.” I also wouldn’t recommend continually doing this unless it’s new content or you have made changes to the site (tech, navigation, etc.).

A lot of these SEO tips are focused on local businesses. What can a nationwide online business do to build links? Should we also set up a Google My Business?

Simone: The principles we discussed for link-building can apply to small or large businesses. For example, if you’re a nationwide business, producing content that’ll appeal to bloggers and journalists is still a good move. You may also want to consider hiring a reputable digital marketing firm to help with your link-building campaigns.

Loren Baker, Founder, Search Engine Journal

If your company has a physical location, then you should set up a Google My Business account.

Loren: Yes, set up a Google My Business and also if you are a brand with press mentions, look into setting up a Wikipedia account. There are also multiple schema- related additions you can make to your site like implementing “same as:” tags which tell Google what your official social channels are. Sometimes, Google may serve these (such as your Twitter handle) in the results.

Does Google count bot pings as visitors, since they are just a few seconds?

Simone: Google’s not perfect, but they’ve done a lot of work to filter out bot traffic. Also, in Google Analytics’ admin panel, you can actually check to filter out hundreds of known spiders & bots from your traffic reports.

Loren: Google is also working to eliminate “referral spam” in Google Analytics. But as Simone mentioned, you can always set up Analytics shortcuts to take bot traffic or IP addresses out of your reporting.

Is there an advantage of sub-domains vs separate sites (i.e., a local franchise or a realtor working for a national organization)?

Simone: From my experience, this is ultimately a business decision. A sub-domain or sub-folder (i.e. www.businessname.com/location) works well if the national organization is dedicated to local optimization. But, local franchisees I’ve worked with often end up setting up separate sites because they don’t get much marketing support. If you do set up a separate site, ask the national organization to link to it. As a word of caution, don’t abuse/buy links if you do have a separate site or you could be penalized by Google.

Loren: Yes, sub folders work well for setting up a geo-hierarchal structure for your website — and also do not forget breadcrumbs. (Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize the information from the page in search results.)

If “writing for Google is the same as writing for Bing,” why do their results differ?

Simone: Their results differ because they run on two distinct algorithms. Google optimizes to create the best results for its searchers and Bing optimizes for its searchers. But, the principles of SEO remain the same: great content, high-quality links, and on-page optimization. At the end of the day, it will be harder to rank high on Google because it’s still the most popular search engine, so there’s more competition.

Loren: I suggest to write for the end users and not just Google, as Google takes user experience into account and a better UX will lead to more social shares, links, and time on site. That being said, focus on Google but make sure you open a Bing Webmaster Tools account to make sure Bing is not experiencing problems spidering and indexing your site.

Is Google My Business only for brick and mortar stores?

Simone: Google My Business is best for brick and mortar stores. However, I encourage all non-home businesses to sign up for an account. Please note that Google won’t accept P.O. boxes and they will send a postcard to the location as a way to verify its existence.

Where can I read more about the Google shift to mobile?

Simone: My first recommended stop is Google’s Webmasters Blog . Google uses that blog to report its technological advances or respond to SEO issues. Of course, I also have to recommend Loren’s publication, Search Engine Journal, for the latest news and analysis on how Google is proceeding to shift to mobile.